Beluga is a German firm that specializes in "super-heavy lift" transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multiton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.

Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, and head to the Russian port city of Arkhangelsk, located near the border with Finland. Normally, this trip requires Beluga's ships to navigate an 11,000-mile route around the south of India and through the Suez Canal. But in 2008, its executives decided that global warming had eroded the Arctic's summer sea ice significantly enough that their ships could travel the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia. Previously, a cargo ship could only safely navigate that route if an icebreaker went ahead, smashing a route through thick ice.

Now, a warming climate had-for six to eight weeks beginning in July-transformed the route into mostly open water, studded with ice floes that the Beluga ships could navigate. So the executives got permission from the Russian government to travel along the coast, paid a transit fee of "a comparably moderate five-digit figure," and sent two ships on their way. Four months later, they'd finished the trip. Compared with the old Suez Canal journey, this shorter route saved an enormous pile of money: It cost $300,000 less per ship in fuel and bunker costs. Global warming had boosted the company's revenues by more than half a million dollars in one year alone.

When I interviewed Beluga ceo Niels Stolberg via email this spring, he said he envisions using the Northeast Passage regularly. Indeed, he's planning on another trip this summer. He said that since the shorter passage requires generating far less CO2, it's "greener." It's also more ironic, since it was high concentrations of CO2 that helped melt the route in the first place.

"I am convinced, " Stolberg added, "that the Arctic will become an area of quite regular sea traffic at least during summer."

if you looked merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question "Is climate change really happening?" is still unresolved. In the last year, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on "Climategate"leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientiststo argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked. Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously called it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup poll found that Americans' concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

But there's one area where doubt hasn't grown-and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: the world of industry and commerce.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That's often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the "reality-based community." If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate-say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise (see "BuhBye East Coast Beaches," page 40)-then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. …

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